“I know, old chap,” Rogers said. “Ce n’est pas magnifique, mais c’est la guerre.”
“Well, all right then, how do they think they’re ever going to end the war like that?”
“Ahah,” said Woodruffe, “they don’t. We’re going to end it for them, us and these well-fed Americans. The French don’t want to fight the Germans anymore.”
“But they don’t mind shooting down a few of our planes.”
“Look,” Lambert said, filling the glasses. “You know the answer, don’t you?”
“Don’t fly over the French lines,” Gabriel said promptly.
There was a pause.
“I’m sorry, but that’s simply not good enough,” Richards said. He was still angry.
“Nothing ever is, when you get right down to it,” Lambert said.
“Except, perhaps, this wine,” Woodruffe said, “which we should now finish up and toddle off home … Waiter, the bill … L’addition … Good God,” he said. “This looks like the balance sheet of a small yet vigorous company. I can’t pay that. Dudley, you have young eyes: show me where the decimal point falls.”
“There,” said Rogers.
“How awful! … Did we really eat all that? I suppose we must have done. Turn out your pockets, everyone.”
They piled their scruffy French bills on the tablecloth and weighed them down with battered coins. Woodruffe sorted through the heap and kept a running total. The others lay back and finished the wine.
“I think this will just be enough,” Woodruffe said, “to cover the tip. Dudley, how much is that car of yours worth?”
“I’m not walking home,” Lambert said.
“I have a fairly valuable pocket-watch,” Richards suggested.
“No, no, dear boy, what we need here is more in the nature of a small jeweler’s shop,” Woodruffe said. “But the offer is appreciated.”
“Do you think they would take a check?” Rogers asked.
“Only if they’re a great deal more gullible than they look.”
Rogers produced a checkbook bound in quarto with pale green Moroccan leather and secured with a gold clip. When he opened it, a gilt-embossed crest glinted dully on handmade cream paper. “Suppose it were a check from …” he peered at the printing “… Dom Antonio da Terceira e Silva, Count of Vila Real Maior, drawn on the House of Rothschild in London? Might that make a difference?”
“Where the deuce did you get that?” Richards asked.
“Found it in the car … Worth trying, d’you think?”
“By all means,” Woodruffe said. “The gold leaf alone should pay for the wine. Wouldn’t it be as well for one of us to impersonate this count thingummy? Who speaks Spanish?”
“I have a little Swiss-Romande,” Gabriel said.
“I think this is Portuguese,” Rogers said. “It belonged to a Portuguese.”
“Well, you know some Portuguese,” Lambert encouraged him.
“Only a very little.”
“So use it sparingly. Give him the bill, Woody.”
“Obrigado,” murmured Rogers. He filled in a check, using a florid hand, and touched up the capitals with generous filigree. He took a swig of wine, dashed off a long signature, proudly angled, and tossed the check to Lambert, “Obrigado,” he said.
Lambert signaled the head waiter and handed him the check, indicating Rogers. “Merci, m’sieu,” the head waiter said. “Obrigado,” Rogers replied. He stood up. The others followed. Waiters hobbled over to remove chairs and help with coats. When all were ready, Rogers held up a hand for silence. He wore his greatcoat like a cloak; in his right hand was a glass of brandy. He saluted all present. “Obrigado,” he told the waiters. He drank down the brandy, handed the glass to Lambert and indicated the fireplace. Lambert hurled the glass into it. The waiters cheered weakly, and turned hastily to the stack of money as Rogers led the party to the door.
Here the head waiter was waiting for them with a smile of deep misery. Bowing, holding the check carefully by its edges, he began a speech of profound regret and lamentable necessity. Rogers took a medal from his pocket and pinned it on the man’s lapel. “Obrigado,” he said, and went out. Lambert shook the head waiter’s hand. Woodruffe shook his hand and embraced him. Richards saluted him. Gabriel brushed the scurf off his shoulders. Then they were out in the street.
Chuck Martin came up to them as they were getting into the car. “Enjoy the meal?” he asked.
“Excellent,” Rogers said. “Thanks very much. Any time you’re near Pont St. Martin, drop in and we’ll take you for a flight. Just ask for Goshawk Squadron, RFC.”
“I’ll do that.”
They drove home at high speed in bright moonlight. The car was warm and comfortable; the road was straight and empty; and Rogers bowled along the crown at an exhilarating pace. “So the checkbook was in this car?” Lambert asked.
“In one of the pockets. I found it yesterday. Jolly handy, what?”
“Did you find the medal here, too?” asked Gabriel.
“Certainly not! That was my medal. Some Belgian general was going around awarding medals to any unit with twenty-five percent casualties in one week, so we qualified. I was the only one at home when he called.”
“No, you weren’t. I was in,” Woodruffe said.
“Were you, Woody? Well, he fancied me, that’s all. You can have the next one.”
“I’d sooner have the car.”
“No, I need the car. We shall be starting cricket soon, and some form of transport will be essential.”
“There won’t be any more cricket when the war ends,” Gabriel said flatly. Rogers looked around in surprise. “What on earth makes you say that?” he asked.
“It’s true. You haven’t been home as recently as Richards and I. The whole world’s changing. People aren’t going to put up with the old 1914 standards anymore. They’ve sacrificed too much for that. They want a real say in their future. They want better lives, better jobs, better homes. There won’t be room for longwinded rituals like cricket.”
“What absolute bloody nonsense!” Rogers swerved indignantly. “Of course there will be cricket, what the blazes d’you think we’re fighting for, the whole purpose of the entire operation is to get back to a world where chaps like you and me can play as much cricket as we want to. Besides—”
“We can’t ‘get back’ to any world. That’s gone forever. We can only get forward. The leisured class has had its day.”
“What rot! The only reason we’re going to win this war is that we have some decent sportsmen in command, and the Huns have a lot of Prussian pig-stickers. Look at old MNT Matthews, captain in the Grenadier Guards, finest opening bat Sussex ever had, killed leading his men over the top at Mons! Look at Martin Stanhope, captained Oxford, brilliant slip-fielder, absolutely brilliant, died of wounds after the Somme! What did they die for, if not for the country they loved? Eh? Answer me that!”
“It’s already been decided,” Gabriel said. “This war has killed cricket.”
“Poppycock! There will always be cricket, because cricket makes men, just as men make cricket. You can’t—”
“Look out!” shouted Woodruffe.
Rogers jerked around just as the front wheels ran off the road and hit the frozen ruts of the verge. For five terrifying seconds he fought the car’s determination to bounce into the ditch; and then they were back on the road, running smoothly again. “Bloody French roads!” Rogers said. “Bloody Portuguese cars! Everybody all right?”
“Slow down, God damn you, and watch where you’re going,” Woodruffe said thickly. He had hit his nose on the windscreen, and it was pouring blood.
“For Christ’s sake, Dudley,” Lambert said. “What’s your bloody hurry?” He had been thrown sideways against a door, and was massaging a bruised ear.
They drove in silence the rest of the way to Pont St. Martin. Rogers kept to a safe speed. “Anyway,” he said as the camp came in sight, “I bet you anything you like we’ll all still be playing cricket after the war
’s over.” Nobody argued.
Force 3: Gentle Breeze
Leaves rustle; wind extends light flag
At eight thousand feet the top of the cloud was flattened and slightly tattered, like spume beaten white on a heaving sea. The sun shone up here, having nothing to stop it, and Woolley flew low across the endless expanse, his wheels ripping casually through ridges and humps. Behind and on either side flew Gabriel and the third replacement pilot, Delaforce, his SE5a patched up with a new propeller to replace the one which had smashed itself against the panicking birds.
Woolley waved them in closer. He was flying toward the sun, and the glare off the cloud was painful. Gabriel moved his wingtip behind Woolley’s, almost opposite his rudder. Delaforce twitched about, his position never steady. Woolley lost speed fractionally so that the others found themselves of necessity creeping in; then, when he decided they were close enough, he took them down in a dive.
Delaforce’s first feeling was relief that they were going home. They had been flying for two hours, and the nervous excitement made him very hungry; he had been sick shortly before takeoff, also from excitement, and now his stomach insisted on food.
Woolley had led them around this stupendous universe of sky as if it were an estate which he had poached all his life. He showed them passing aircraft, often pointing them out seconds before these tiny flecks became visible to them. He stalked planes through the naked sky, placing his own aircraft where the sun and the angle made them least visible, and closing in with endless, painstaking patience; until the quarry lay below, as shining-innocent and unaware as trout in a clear pool.
Then, when Woolley had made Gabriel and Delaforce understand how all things moved toward a favorable conjunction—height, sun, distance, angle of attack, drift of wind—he would take them right up to that perfect instant and drop on the droning French Nieuport or British two-seater RE8 or whatever it was, in a lethal gathering pounce that could have only one ending; except that he cut it short after a hundred feet and curled away to do it all over again somewhere else. It was fascinating and exhilarating and draining, and Delaforce wanted urgently to get some good food inside himself so that he could go up and do it all again.
Now they plunged through the first layer of cloud into a gray cavern where wisps and flecks floated up like bits of broken barricades. Woolley deepened the dive and waved Gabriel and Delaforce in closer. The brittle clatter of engines merged into a hoarse roar. Each airplane spoke its individual strains and pressures: loose fabric drummed furiously, struts wheezed or ticked, wires whistled. Delaforce sensed a steadily mounting throb which possessed his entire machine: it shivered his limbs. The flimsy obstacles grew bigger, and Woolley started swinging over or under each puffball; or sometimes he banked left and careered round it only to bank right and skid past another. Each decision he delayed until the very end, like a skier gauging the last inch he needed to whip round a rock.
The canyon narrowed, the barricading cloudlets grew, and still Woolley swept on down, skidding and skedaddling like a lunatic. Gabriel and Delaforce hung on, losing him a little more at every turn, but rarely clipping an obstacle, either. The dirty, blank wall at the bottom rushed up, and its gray face began to reveal cracks and hollows. Woolley flew right into it.
Delaforce hunched his shoulders as he smacked into the woolly gloom. At once all sense of speed dissolved, and then all sense of altitude or direction. He was going forward; that was all. The gloom slipped past, muffling his engine and burying his comrades. There was literally nothing he could do. He even closed his eyes and listened to the soft howl of the slipstream. Then he was out in the clear, hard open again, and Woolley was wheeling the dive into a long, slow corkscrew to the right, where a funnel of sky pushed a hole through the murk. He spiraled down the walls of this funnel, losing speed with each turn and flattening the coils until the three aircraft were lazily chasing their trails over a bank of cloud as firm as blancmange. Delaforce laughed aloud at the sheer pleasure of it.
Without warning, Woolley switched off his engine and let the plane slip sideways into the cloud. This caught Gabriel and Delaforce by surprise: he had told them to follow him, but they didn’t expect this. They flew another circuit. Delaforce cut his engine and let the plane drop. Gabriel went round once more and followed him.
Delaforce came out of the cloud about three hundred feet above the ground. After the empty oceans, this seemed frighteningly close and definite. He grabbed the plane out of its side-slip and thrust it into a shallow dive. Then he saw that it was the airfield underneath. Down there on his left was Woolley, drifting in for the touchdown. Delaforce felt stupid: what was he doing up here? Hastily he side-slipped again. It never occurred to him to re-start his engine. Woolley hadn’t. Delaforce landed as near the old man as he could. Gabriel came in about twenty seconds later.
Delaforce undid his straps. He stretched his legs and arms, and filled his lungs. He put his head back and rubbed his eyes, and luxuriated in doing absolutely nothing for the first time in two hours. Woolley said: “Get your fat ass out of there.” He turned and walked over to Gabriel’s machine and spat on the hot exhaust. Gabriel, climbing down, looked at him like a private tutor meeting a difficult child for the first time.
“You piss-proud ponce,” Woolley said. “You drive that miserable sodding airplane around as if you’re mowing the bleeding lawn. You drive it, you cruel bastard. You get your great horny hands on it and you drive it, you son of a bitch. Jesus, I’d hate to be the first woman you climb on top of.”
Gabriel listened carefully. “In what respects did you find my technique faulty?” he asked.
Woolley stared with a kind of weary disgust. “Your bloody technique is word-perfect,” he said bitterly. “It’s just that you’re sterile, frigid and impotent. You treat this aircraft as if it owes you money.”
Gabriel stood stiffly. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Take off your gloves,” Woolley ordered. “Roll up your sleeve.”
Gabriel did these actions with a semi-medical air. Woolley took his wrist and felt the pulse. After a moment he let go. “Does flying bore you?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Doesn’t excite you, does it? I don’t suppose you ever get scared up there.”
“One tries to keep a clear head, sir.”
“Good Christ … Don’t you ever lose your temper, you bloody fillet?”
“As I said, sir, one tries to stay in control of oneself.”
“Prick!” Woolley swung his right leg, heavily booted, and swept Gabriel’s legs from under him. Gabriel landed hard on his rump, on the frozen ground. Tears of pain came to his eyes. Woolley advanced on him, delivering short, jabbing kicks. Gabriel rolled away, but Woolley went after him, so Gabriel had to roll faster. “You craven little sod!” Woolley bawled. “Don’t you have any balls at all?” His boots thudded into Gabriel’s ribs. Gabriel grappled, seeking to smother, but Woolley was too strong: the kicks hurt more and more. “Fool! Infant! Coward! Lawnmower!” Woolley shouted. “Gutless bloody lawnmower!” He hounded Gabriel, going after the vulnerable parts of his body.
At last Gabriel lurched to his knees and grabbed Woolley’s legs. Woolley pounded him about the head with his fists. Gabriel roared and tried to butt Woolley in the gut. They fell, rolled and punched, and came apart. Gabriel drew back his boot to lash out—and stopped.
Woolley, on his hands and knees, was watching him, looking into his eyes, searching. Gabriel stared back and hated him. Their breath gasped harshly in the cold air. “Did you keep a cool head then, lawnmower?” Woolley panted. “Were you in bloody control of yourself then? That’s what you have to do up there. Turn into a bloody assassin! Kill! Understand, you bastard Boy Scout? Kill. Only a maniac would do this job, and you’re too sane by half. You madden up, lawnmower, before some madman beats you to it, or I’ll kill you myself. Understand? Understand?”
Woolley got up. Delaforce was open-mouthed, wide-eyed. “As for you,” Woolley said stonily, �
�you’re putting your gallant little heart and soul into it, aren’t you? Start using your tiny brain too, or you’ll end up with your lights all over the cockpit floor.”
He trudged off to the marquee where the pilots ate their meals.
Half the squadron was eating lunch when Woolley went in. Dangerfield was reading a letter, Church was staring into space, Lambert was nursing a headache, and Kimberley and Killion were arguing.
“But there’s millions of things that have nothing to do with sex,” Kimberley insisted. He was a farmer’s son from Derbyshire: sturdy, skeptical, with the rapid, almost stuttering speech of his region. “Coal mines, for instance. Nothing sexy about them, is there? Or … or wood.” He rapped on the table. “Or anything around here. Flying. What’s flying have to do with sex?”
“Starting with coal mines,” Killion said. He was twenty; a slightly built, intense-looking man who could have been a very young schoolmaster or a very old schoolboy. In fact, he had failed his exams after a year as a medical student in a London hospital, and joined the RFC the same day, on impulse. “Here we have man creating, as it were, an opening in Mother Earth. What does he do then? He explores it, testing its limits. Goodness gracious, Kimberley, coal mining is practically an act of rape! You force an entrance, my dear chap, in order to reach the source of all power. Honestly, I blush at your innocence, I do really.”
“I went spelunking once,” Lambert said. “I never thought of it like that. Awfully mucky down there.”
“That,” said Killion, “only goes to show how much you have idealized and disinfected the act of penetration. If anything, I should say that you were in a worse condition than Kimberley. He has his eyes shut, but you are facing in the wrong direction.”
“You haven’t done wood,” Woolley grunted.
“Wood? You seriously ask me to explain the sexuality of wood?” Killion looked at them. Dangerfield stopped reading his letter. “Wood is what trees consist of. Have you never looked at a tree?” He stood his knife on end. “Have you never appreciated the thrusting trunk …?”
Goshawk Squadron Page 4